Financial constraints and foreign market entries or exits: firm-level evidence from France

Article dans une revue: In contrast to a large strand of the literature that focuses on multi-product firms, this paper examines multi-destinations firms and the effects of financial constraints on newly served and newly exited destinations. Intuitively, financial constraints have a negative impact on firm expansion in new destinations by limiting firm ability to finance entry costs. The effect on exit from existing destinations is ambiguous. Due to financial constraints, a firm may face difficulties financing the recurrent costs of maintaining her market presence. But if financial constraints also affect entry, the firm may have strong incentives to stay in a given destination since it may not be able to fund the fixed entry costs associated to the reallocation of her portfolio of destinations. We develop a simple theoretical model which includes these two effects. We use a unique longitudinal dataset on French firms that contains information on export destinations of individual firms and allows to construct various firm-level measures of financial constraints to test these predictions. The empirical results suggest that financial constraints hamper a firms’s ability to cover fixed entry costs as well as recurrent costs associated with maintaining the presence in a foreign market, thereby reducing the probability of entering into a new foreign markets and increasing the probability of exiting from an existing foreign market.

Auteur(s)

Philippe Askenazy, Aida Caldera, Guillaume Gaulier, Delphine Irac

Revue
  • Review of World Economics
Date de publication
  • 2015
Mots-clés JEL
F1 F10 G10
Mots-clés
  • Trade
  • Financial constraints
  • Firm heterogeneity
Pages
  • 231-253
Version
  • 1
Volume
  • 151